Goodbye WordPress, hello Octopress

This is my first post published using Octopress after several years of WordPress and I’d like to share the reasons why I choosed to change blogging platform and switch to a statically generated site.

Yes, because what you are reading is pure and static old-school HTML, generated by Octopress on my iMac. And there’s more: everything is served by GitHub trought the Pages feature, completely free, but I’ll talk about this later.

Simplicity

Octopress is a framework built upon Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator that powers GitHub Pages.

Jekyll takes a content directory, parses all articles and pages through a Markdown converter and generates a static website that can be served with almost anything.

Octopress leverages all the power of Jekyll adding a great HTML5 template, mobile ready, and a lot of features like archives, an xml sitemap, code highlighting, external services integration (Twitter, Github, Google+), and much much more.

This solution makes your website really fast because there’s no dynamic code that runs on the server and no databases.

Now I can write articles using MarkDown and the beautiful iA Writer. Furthermore I can easily version my articles on GitHub and backup them using Dropbox.

Reduced costs

One of my new year resolutions is to reduce costs for online services like webhosting, image hosting, backups, etc.

Having static html pages, I can host them on GitHub for free, while now I’m paying nearly 200$ every year for a linux/php/mysql hosting.
Maybe someday GitHub will start charging money for the hosting service, but for now I think is the best I can get.

Obviously I can’t host media files or archive on GitHub so I’ll use Flickr for image hosting and Amazon S3 for other files.